Data Story Telling 13: The Story

Final post in the data story telling series

So, at this point, we’ve spent a lot of time on the graph side of things. When you are having a casual conversation with the others in your data science team, you can just pull one of those graphs, talk about it, and it’ll be fine. However, when you are in an interview setting, or you are communicating with others outside of your team, you will need to know how to speak to them with a properly constructed story.

1 - What *Exactly* is a Story?

At it’s core, a story explains *the how*, and why something changes. In the beginning, all stories start off with everything being in balance & harmony. Then, something happens, an event that messes the natural order, and takes it out of balance. The result of the story is all about bringing this balance back: the struggles, the conflicts, and the suspense.

If you want an example of a story that everyone is familiar with, take a look at ATLA intro:

Harmony: All 4 nations (Fire, Water, Earth, and Air) being in balance
Event: The fire nation attacked & The Avatar disappeared
The Rest: The struggles The Avatar (Aang) has to go through in order to bring balance back (and *why* he cares about it)

2 - The Beginning

The first thing you want to do is introduce the plot, aka build up the context for your audience. If in a job interview, don’t go straight to the project that you worked, instead talk about the business first, and then slowly make your way to your project, once the groundwork has been established. In the beginning, your job is to set up the following:

1. Setting

2. Main character

3. Unresolved problem

4. Desired outcome

The goal of *The Beginning* to to answer the audience’s main question: “Why should I pay attention to this?”

Here is a list of 5 key items you want to ensure the beginning of your story has:

Setting: When & Where does the story take place?
Main Character: Who is the main person driving the action?
Imbalance: Why is it necessary, what has been changed?
Balance: What is the desired outcome that you want to see happen?
Solution: How will the main character bring about the changes?

Take a look at this video below, and see if you can spot the 5 key items:

Setting: Titan Mining Installation
Main Character: SGT Gabe Weller
Imbalance: Something is attacking the people there, and threatens his Significant Other
Balance: Save his Significant Other
Solution: The rest of the video game

Why the audience cares:
This hostile entity just wiped out his entire team in just a few seconds, and you can hear them screaming in pain. It now threatens his significant other (very relatable). At the end, you can hear screams near our protagonist alerting him of immediate danger!

3 - The Middle

Once you’ve set the stage, the vast majority of your communication happens here, in the middle. Your goal here is to retain your audience’s attention by addressing how *they* can solve the problem *you* introduced. You’ll work with them to convince them why they should accept the solution you are proposing, or act in the way *you* want *them* to.

In ATLA, the audience has several ideas in their mind already on how to tackle the problem of the fire nation attacking, and the goal of the story is to slowly show the audience why their solutions are ineffective, and then eventually lead them to the one that the storytellers came up with.

Here’s a breakdown of some solutions the viewers would have in mind, and why the story shows they’d be ineffective:

1 - It’s 3 Nations vs 1. Why are the 3 nations losing? The Air Nomads are extinct except for The Avatar, and the Water Tribes are severely weakened. The Southern Water Tribe is barely able to defend itself. The Northern Water Tribe is completely isolated. The Earth Kingdom is riddled with corruption and internal strife. This division and weakness in each nation show why a straightforward alliance to overpower the Fire Nation is not effective.

2 - Send an assassin to exterminate The Fire Lord’s leader. The show introduces the daughter of the current Fire Lord: Azula. She’s mentally insane and would cause more death & destruction than the current Fire Lord.

3 - Send The Avatar to end the war. The beginning clearly establishes that no one knows where The Avatar is. They just vanished without a trace. Then, when eventually found, he is not fully trained in all the elemental arts, especially firebending. He has a pacifist nature, and the burden of being the last Airbender add significant personal conflicts to him. And, he’s also just a child, good luck convincing a child to commit murder. All of these elements prevent him from taking immediate action.

That’s The Avatar…. a child…. he’s supposed to defeat the most powerful man on the planet (The Fire Lord)…

Once all of the basic solutions that the audience tries to come up with are all explained away, they then become far more susceptible to *your* solution.

In a similar fashion, once you have introduced the beginning, your audience has their own solutions in mind, and it’s your job to start talking about them, and start explaining why every single one of those will fail. And then, finally, introduce yours.

Here is a list of ideas you can include in your story to help convince them to buy in:

• Further develop the problem by covering additional relevant background

• Add in external content & comparison points

• Include data that demonstrates the problem

• Articulate the consequences of not taking *any action*

• Discuss several potential solutions for solving the problem

• Explain away several potential solutions, until only 1 is left, aka your solution

4 - The End

Finally, the story must have an end. End with a call to action, make it very clear to the audience what you want them to do with the new understanding or knowledge you’ve imparted to them. A classic way to end a story is to tie it back to the beginning.

The Avatar (Bottom) vs The Fire Lord (Top)

At the beginning we set up what everything looks like when it’s in harmony, and balanced. Then we set up the problem which ruined this harmony. Now, in the ending, we will tie it back to the beginning and return harmony once again.

Here, you can see members of all 4 nations (Fire, Water, Air, Earth) together once again. And the world is back in harmony & balance